All tagged whiteness

White Womanhood, Hindutva and Spiritual Bypass: Museum Yoga and the Mass-Participation Spectacle

White Womanhood, Hindutva and Spiritual Bypass: Museum Yoga and the Mass-Participation Spectacle

Kajal Nisha Patel
Articles

Over the past decade, postural-yoga classes have grown to become “museum yoga” attracting new audiences to North American and Western European museums and galleries. The author argues that the museum yoga spectacle is a derivative trend that follows International Yoga Day as a virtue-signalling performance. These annual events are largely attended by a global cultic milieu of affluent white women, who organise themselves into a grand spectacle of mass participation. Through their involvement in the museum yoga spectacle, programming staff and participants are “spiritually bypassing”. As an alternative, the author moves towards examples of museum-yoga education that better engage learners.

Whitewash: Robert E. Lee and the New Iconoclasm

Whitewash: Robert E. Lee and the New Iconoclasm

Howard Skrill
Articles

Through plein-air drawings and studio works on paper, this essay grapples with processes of national belonging and exclusion brought to bear on the surfaces of extant public monuments in the racialized landscape of the U.S. ‘Whitewash’ is an opaque layer that is slathered over what lies beneath so that the latter is concealed and, hopefully, in time, forgotten. However, even a cursory inspection often reveals what was meant to remain hidden. Similarly, an exploration of the fate of two representations of the U.S. Confederate general Robert E. Lee reveals the nationalist, political forces that led to these monuments’ raising and subsequent removal.

Hercules in White: Classical Reception, Art and Myth

Hercules in White: Classical Reception, Art and Myth

Aimee Hinds
Articles, Peer Reviewed

The polychromy of classical sculpture has been systematically suppressed in Western art since the Renaissance resulting in an artificial whiteness that fits within a tradition of presenting false racial narratives of the Greco-Roman historical past and mythology, one that codes all idealised bodies as white, young, and hetero-normative. Using an intersectional framework to consider the significance of class, gender and race, the author analyses receptions of the Farnese Hercules and explores why (lack of) colour has been weaponised as a way for Western culture to claim an inheritance from the ancient Greco-Roman world, and how this is perpetuated in modern classical reception.